Oxford Mathematician Ben Green on how and why he has been pondering footballs in high dimensions.
"A 3-dimensional football is usually a truncated icosahedron. This solid has the virtue of being pleasingly round, hence its widespread use as a football. It is also symmetric in the sense that there is no way to tell two different vertices apart: more mathematically, there is a group of isometries of $\mathbf{R}^3$ acting transitively on the vertices.